


ebb on with them who homeward go

by gabolange



Category: The Doctor Blake Mysteries
Genre: Character Study, Episode Related, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-13
Updated: 2018-06-13
Packaged: 2019-05-21 16:29:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14918868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gabolange/pseuds/gabolange
Summary: Their marriage will be made out of the ashes of this day.Jean reflects during 5.07, “A Good Drop.”





	ebb on with them who homeward go

**Author's Note:**

> With abiding thanks to pellucid for the thoughtful, thorough beta read. Any remaining errors are my own, and any resemblance to other work is unintended. 
> 
> For Jean.

***

Rose delivers the news of Lucien’s divorce hearing, earnest in her concern. Jean hears herself go through the motions of responding: I will talk to Lucien just as soon as he gets home. Would you like some tea, Rose? No, of course you need to get back to work, thank you again for letting me know.

Jean sighs as she sees Rose out. 

What have you done, Lucien? But she knows, now that it’s been laid out before her: he mailed the affidavit. He promised he wouldn’t, and he meant it in the moment; he believed with her that there might be a better solution than swearing to the court that he’s a drunk and a brute, that no woman should have to abide his presence or share his name.

And yet, he’s gone and done it, hasn’t he? 

Some of it Jean cannot argue. He’s not cruel, never, but Lucien does drink. Too much sometimes, and she knows he will never be able to walk away. Just weeks ago, he’d drawn her down beside him in the studio, his sketchbooks open in his lap, showing her history he’d once tried to hide. She couldn’t tell which pictures were memory and which were nightmare, but it didn’t matter. 

For so long, the alcohol helped mute his visions of too many bodies and too much horror, so that he might sleep, and work, and slowly find his way back to life. 

She’d curled up against him then, borrowing his glass and letting the whiskey on her lips dull the ache in her heart conjured by the drawings before them. You used to hate this, Lucien said, pouring them a second dram, and she’d shrugged. It isn’t the taste she has grown to love, but the intimate promise of sharing it with Lucien. 

They’d passed the tumbler between them as he turned the pages, tracing charcoal outlines with his fingers. The room closed around them and she tucked herself more firmly against his side, letting him take comfort in touch as much as the burn of the drink. 

I just want to marry you, Jean, he’d said softly, voice muffled against her hair. At the time, she’d thought it an apology for the barbarism he was sharing, as if she didn’t already know about the horror that lurks behind his eyes when he rests. Now, she wonders if it was an excuse, the answer she so desperately wants for this burning question: why did you send the affidavit? I asked you not to. 

He wants to marry her, and to protect her reputation, even if it comes at the expense of his own. Lucien Blake is a drunk, let them say, but Jean Beazley is no adulteress–even if she wears an engagement ring given by a married man and kisses him goodnight at the foot of the stairs in a house they share. He would not have to name her if he testified to adultery instead of drunkenness—but after all this time, it couldn’t be anyone else. Ballarat knows them both well enough to know this.

Ballarat thinks they gave in ages ago, but it is wrong. 

She’s thought about it, more than she should. Jean winds their fingers together when they sit together on the couch and imagines his hands on her skin under her clothes; he turns his face into her palm and she wonders what his beard will feel like against her breasts and between her legs. 

She holds Lucien’s hands at bay, but that does not stop him from pressing her close when they dance to the wireless, letting her feel his desire against her. It would be easy to rub her hips against his, to undo his waistcoat and his shirt, to press her lips to his neck and his shoulder, to let one thing lead to another. It would be so easy, and she wants so much.

A long time ago, she gave in to the want of a man who was not yet her husband. We’ll be married soon anyway, she and Christopher had promised each other on those late spring afternoons, overcome by lust and easy joy. And then with her belly swelling beneath their hands, it was nothing to move up the wedding; it would be warmer besides.

She’d married him, but first fallen to her knees at confession. I have sinned, she said, but in her heart she wasn’t sorry–how could she be, for the love they shared and the new life they had made? She could not then or now regret those heady early days, before that bloody Saturday morning when she had her first taste of loss, and with it the horrible realization that God might not be kind. 

She does not want loving Lucien to be a sin she has to repent, and so she will wait until the divorce, for a proper engagement, a wedding. She will wait for the wedding night she never had, one full of anticipation and need. 

The divorce–. The divorce that the church will not recognize. Jean Beazley is no adulteress, but even after they are married, that is not what the church will say.

Adultery is a mortal sin, she knows, has been taught since before she can remember. It dishonors that sacred covenant between man and wife and God that is marriage–but it does not break it. Marriage is a sacrament and nothing can break it, the church says, except death. 

She believed it for a long time. She believed it on her wedding day and every day she was married. She believed it the first time and the next time that Dorothy Turner arrived at their sewing circle hiding bruises on her arms. Had she still believed it when her friend found herself in hospital for weeks, bleeding from the brain after her husband beat her to within an inch of her life?

That was the first moment of doubt that marriage, the tie that kept Dorothy bound to a hideous man, could be something to lament instead of celebrate. Even if the church did not see that such a bond should be broken, Jean could, and so could anyone with a heart. She revised quietly in her mind: nothing can break the sacrament, except death and torment.

But if she granted a reprieve to Dorothy Turner it was only for the violent severing of a holy covenant, an exception that might prove the rule. Mei Lin’s appearance on her doorstep was nothing so dire, and Jean sent Lucien to his wife over and over in service of that ideal she cherished: marriage is sacred.

But she could see it in both their eyes; time and circumstance and the godforsaken war had done their part. The war had beaten them and starved them, had forced their baby girl from their arms, had left them to wander the world apart, finding their way alone and untethered. If Lucien became hysterical with grief, Mei Lin became resolute and brittle, and soon both wore faces they could not recognize in the mirror, let alone in each other’s eyes.

Lucien had tried, early in their courtship, to tell her about his wife. Mei Lin lit up the room, he said, with a brilliant smile and a wicked tongue. She kept you on your toes, Jean observed, and Lucien laughed and kissed her head. 

His marriage had been an easy reminiscence that night, fond and distant, but later Jean could see no evidence of the woman he had described. Mei Lin was now someone else entirely, quiet and strong. After Mei Lin had gone, Lucien said, I didn’t know her. I searched and searched, and then she was a stranger. What kind of man doesn’t know his own wife?

It had been seventeen years, Jean said.

Lucien laughed sharply. Mei Lin said the same thing, he said. 

Was anything left now to make their marriage sacred? It was a death of another sort, brought on by so much torment and too much time. Their vows, made earnestly, had not been upheld in word or deed. Their love, once promised fervently, had been mourned and laid to rest. The man and woman who made those oaths had been forgotten and remade in Changi, in Shenzhen, and in the long, empty years that separated them.

Marriage is holy, Jean knows, a sacrament to be honored. But this? It was no longer a marriage but a memory of different people in a different place, another miserable casualty of the war. 

But if Lucien cannot understand why the court will not budge in acknowledgement this truth of their lives, Jean wonders why the church cannot. She can withstand the court’s iniquities but not the idea that God can look at Lucien and Mei Lin and see anything but a promise shattered, that no amount of time or prayer could save. 

Jean detests too that God can look at her and Lucien and see a love that would desecrate His words rather than honor them. Perhaps once, when Lucien was drunk more often than he was sober, when he might have earned the reputation he affirmed in that bloody affidavit. But not now, not when he has come so far.

She hadn’t wanted to love him, with all his chaos and despair. But he wreaked his havoc in search of good—a murderer caught, a daughter found—and soon she could hardly regret it, began to anticipate the challenge, and then the joy in his eyes. 

He sought her counsel in the midst of his pursuits, and in his confidence she found her own: there she was, that girl who used to dream of bigger things, and Lucien was the only one who could draw her out. 

He will show her the world, he says. Jean Blake will wander the streets of London and Paris and Rome one day, and later when she wakes up beside her husband it will be with the memory of ancient cobbled stones beneath her feet. He is everything she was never supposed to want.

And oh, she wants him.

Surely God must understand the difference between this divorce and the adultery she holds at bay every night, fingers clenched against Lucien’s understanding. God does not turn his back on His children, she said lately, but perhaps she was wrong: no matter the circumstances, the church will not recognize the divorce. If she marries Lucien, unrepentant, she will be cast out. 

Father Emery puts before her this impossible choice, worse than adultery or drunkenness or abandonment: Lucien or the church. Repent and refuse Lucien, be brought back into the fold, be granted again the hope for eternal life. Or marry the man she loves in pursuit of an earthly joy, without her community, without her God. 

Why is her soul the price of this last chance at contentment? 

Her questions don’t matter, she is told. Church doctrine is clear. One, or the other.

And now Lucien has mailed the affidavit, and her protest didn’t matter. He mailed the affidavit, and the hearing is scheduled for next month. He mailed the affidavit, and–.

She takes a breath as it comes to her.

He mailed the affidavit and lied to her about it for what must be weeks now, if not months. She traces it back, the way he’d joked in his hospital bed—I have something to tell you—and then changed his mind in the face of her relief that he would live. She remembers him later in the hallway, looking anywhere but at her face as she chastised him: just don’t lie to me, that’s all I ask.

Every moment he hadn’t told her runs together in her mind. She knows why he sent it—to protect her, because he thought it was the only way, because he just wants to marry her, the church be damned—but the lie? 

If only he’d said: I’m sorry Jean, I can’t stomach what it would do to you. I know you disagree, and maybe you’re right, but I had to take this chance. 

If only. If only he stopped thinking of her as—what? His keeper? His housekeeper?

Wasn’t he listening when she said he didn’t need to sneak around? That she knows what it means to be married to him, that she will abide his chaos but not his secrets? Such a chance missed, that moment when he stared at her, mute with desire and regret. I’m going to be your wife, she said, and the words sparked between them, a new kind of promise. 

But still he’d persisted with the lie. 

Of all the things she fought with Christopher about, honesty was never one of them. Perhaps they’d had the opposite problem, flinging too many words with no concern about the hurt they could cause. You hate it here, he told her once when the boys were small and the crops were poor. You want to be anywhere else but with me. 

I want to be anywhere else with you, she’d said, as if Christopher would ever leave, ever want anything but the failing plot of land beneath their feet. It was too much truth, that she wanted something impossible, and it hung between them until the day he left.

She wishes, sometimes, that she had held her tongue that day and so many times later. But now, she wants only Lucien’s honest accounting, no matter his imagined consequences. What had he thought she would say? Does he think, somehow, that she could be content to live forever in this in-between, waiting for a better answer? 

I want to marry you, too, she’d told him that evening in the studio, paging through his pictures.

I wish you would trust me, she thinks now. Why didn’t you listen to me?

But Lucien has been abandoned too many times in too many ways, has long since renounced the God she loves. The church, this perpetual wait—she knows why he mailed the letter.

But why did you lie, Lucien?

There’s no use stewing on it now. There is dinner to consider and pudding to make, and she can speak with Lucien when he gets home, just as she told Rose. Jean checks her watch; the post should be here by now.

She tidies her hands and pushes open the door. The flag is up on the mailbox and it’s just a few quick strides for the post and the afternoon edition. Today’s paper–.

Oh no. Oh Lucien. Oh no.

 _Drunken Doctor’s Divorce Scandal._

Her anger flares, hot beneath her breastbone. He hadn’t thought of this, had he? For all his genius at seeing the different angles of every murder case, he couldn’t imagine that things might get out of hand. Couldn’t imagine that Edward Tyneman would print the details for everyone to see, put Jean’s face next to his as if this was the next chapter in some tawdry serial with a photo spread.

He was trying to protect her, was that it? How does that look now?

Jean crumples the paper between her hands, letting the ink stain her fingers. She returns to the house, and the door slams behind her, a forgotten pleasure in the heat of anger, and the crash echoes between the empty rooms, hers alone. If only the house could shake with it, with her.

Lucien isn’t here to wonder at the noise. No, he will not be home for hours, not for tea or dinner, if at all. If he couldn’t stand to fight with her about the affidavit, what will he have to say now that their private business is printed all over the afternoon edition, there in everyone’s mailbox to be enjoyed with cake and lemonade?

She unfolds the paper and forces herself to read it.

Public drunkenness. Emotional cruelty to his Chinese wife. Work compromised. The whiff of scandal at his home–just a hint, but enough. 

She’d told him this could ruin him and he said he didn’t care, but this, this is worse than she expected. He’s never thought twice about what people think of him, caring only for the truth–but oh, the truth will out, won’t it? 

He will lose his position with the police. Matthew’s protection and patience extend only so far, and surely this will travel from Ballarat to Melbourne like wildfire. The police surgeon drinks on duty, there’s a thing the brass can’t possibly ignore. Munro had tried to bring him down and failed, but this will surely succeed where he had not.

He will lose patients. Who wants to be seen by a man who is estranged from his family, emotionally distant, cruel, drunk? Who wants to be seen by a man who would divorce his wife to marry his housekeeper, no matter the inane footnote. Mrs. Beazley is an upstanding member of the community, a woman of good morals—except for the implication she abides a seedy arrangement with a distasteful man.

Her reputation goes with his, now. Her face is printed next to his, and it’s a good thing she’s going to marry him, because what else could she do? There isn’t another job to be had in this town, not after this. She wouldn’t know where to start over, not with Christopher Jr. soon to be posted overseas. And as much as she wants to see the world, it was never something to do alone. 

No, when she imagines Paris and Rome, it is with Lucien’s hand at her back, guiding her over those cobbled roads, cozying beside her in the cafes he loved as young man. And even as she clenches her fists she knows she will never think differently, never want anyone but him, never want anything but this life in this house and all their whispered dreams. Perhaps that is the biggest fault between them.

But how can he not see that they stand to lose so much? Her reputation, his reputation, his livelihood. Now will the money he’s been putting away for their honeymoon go to the milkman and the butcher? 

It’s not as bad as that, Jean, he might say, but what would he know? He never thought it could get as bad as this. 

It isn’t that it couldn’t be worse, that she hasn’t lived through worse. What’s all this compared to a telegram six months late, plucked from her hands by eager young fingers desperate for news? Or to Jack’s sullen face behind the bars of that Melbourne jail? Now you won’t have to worry about me, Mum, he’d said and turned his head, refusing to look at her even as the warden led her out.

This is nothing compared to greeting Lucien’s wife with a smile and a ring cutting sharply into her palm. Nothing to Matthew’s voice, tinny through the line but straight to the point: Lucien’s been stabbed.

She draws a breath, deep and slow. She has known far worse than this, even if her stomach twists in an echo of past hurts that will linger long after this one fades.

Such a bloody mess, and of Lucien’s own making. He should know this town by now, know that Edward Tyneman could get his dirty fingers in every pie. He should know that there are no secrets here, only luck in finding the right people to shelter them.

But she hadn’t thought Rose would fall on the wrong side of that line. Jean had missed it the first time, caught up in her own face staring back at her from the newspaper, but there it is: her young friend’s name printed proudly atop the story. 

How could she? How _dare_ she? It is one thing to think Edward Tyneman could print this–of course he could. Getting Lucien’s goat is his favorite hobby; he couldn’t pass this up. But Rose? 

Jean sits heavily at the table. Lucien, at least, she can understand, no matter her frustration. I just want to marry you, Jean, he’d said, and raced off blindly in pursuit of that goal. But Rose? By now Rose should understand the difference between ambition and profiteering, and this reeks of the latter. But at the expense of her friends? 

I expected better of you, she thinks. She’d said that to Jack so many times, fury and disappointment in those quiet words, but it hadn’t mattered. Jack always curried her disfavor or dismissed it as irrelevant, with a quick _sorry, Mum_ as she was brushed off again. But she’s never thought Rose was like that; no, Rose was more like Lucien: brash, headstrong, too often unthinking, but not deliberately cruel.

Until now. 

She wipes at her eyes, but there are no tears there, just the strain of the day and the last months weighing her eyelids down. She should know, after all this time, that there’s no good in hoping for this place to be different, or for good intentions to be enough. Is that her sin? Must she confess to too much trust, in the girl who takes dinner at her elbow, in this town she knows by the dirt under her nails, in the man she loves as fiercely as she ever did her husband? 

Father Emery would say there is no fault in it, but he would be wrong. 

She had known once to hold herself back, to take what was given and no more. In the end, it is what she learned most from Christopher, or tried to: a contentment with a little life in a little place, a plot of land or a house with flowers. In it, there were no days like this one–not until Lucien brought her careful world crashing down around her.

She could hate him for it, sometimes. The anger at this place that raised her, the tears she has wept for want of a married man, the pride with which she carries herself now, head high in the face of so many unkind words–she has confessed these things and will again. It would be easier to go back to that time before she knew him, when dinner was at 5:30 on the dot every day–.

The sin, she knows, is in wanting more. It drew cracks in her marriage, and then in the stable life she’d fought so hard for, and still she cannot help herself. Today the consequences are laid out before her in the afternoon’s paper, in the regret she will hear later in Lucien’s voice. She could imagine them more than he, and he didn’t listen, and then he lied.

And so here they are.

**

The garden is always the first place she goes when she seeks peace. This land that is more hers than Lucien’s, and it calms her, not only the dirt under her fingers but the predictability of it all. The bulbs she planted in the fall came up with the first spring rain, and now the hydrangeas are coming into bloom under the early summer heat.

The house hadn’t had much of a garden when she had first moved in, left to wither in the years between Genevieve’s death and Jean’s arrival. But old Doctor Blake had been cheered by the flowers Jean cultivated, and soon his patients commented at how well the grounds were looking, and so she kept at it, growing now for beauty instead of sustenance. 

And it is beautiful, and hers alone. Lucien joins her in the sunroom sometimes, a glint in his eye as he takes her in, as if he thinks she conjures the flowers with feminine magic instead of hard work. But right now she wants to distract herself from memories of that fond look, from any thoughts of him, from anything but the pull of weeds between her fingers.

But Rose shatters her quiet, desperate to explain, as if her name atop the article isn’t explanation enough. “I thought we were friends,” Jean says and steps away. Is it forgiveness Rose seeks for her selfish betrayal? She won’t find it here, not from her.

A different girl she would walk beside to church to repent her sins, to be absolved for her cruelty by someone more able to grant such a pardon, to seek out the peace of God’s presence—but that is not for Rose. Jean casts her shears and gloves aside. Could she find calm at the church today? 

She washes her hands and does not change; there is no Mass now, no one to see her in today’s working clothes. God can hardly fault her the sweat of hard work–but what does she know of God anymore? She used to be so sure of His place in her life, of His compassion and care. 

And now, as she opens the heavy door to the chapel, Jean learns she was wrong: in this place she has so often found shelter, she finds only questions.

Jean knows so many without faith, Lucien among them. One day, perhaps, she will ask if his faith was shattered by his mother’s death or his father’s dismissals or if it took the torments of the camp to drive God from his heart. She understands why Lucien has turned from God, but God has been her comfort in so many of her darkest times. He stood behind her at Christopher’s funeral, giving her strength for the boys as they knelt in grass that did not shelter their father, and has stood beside her every day since.

She believed, once and for a long time, that God would punish those who transgressed against Him. Her baby girl was proof, a direct consequence–a sin, a failure of repentance, the worst possible loss. God is not vengeant, Father Morton said again and again, it is sin that has consequences. Strive for a life of charity and prayer and accept your circumstances with grace. God is with you always.

And He has been. She has spent too many days alone with her thoughts and God, tending the flowers and sweeping the floor; every morning she sees him in the petals of her aloe plant, keeping Christopher’s memory alive with her.

She has no idea how to reconcile that presence with the doctrine she is now asked to abide. The more she considers, the less she understands–and now, despite the trials of the day, she can only confess her confusion: how can marrying Lucien be a sin? 

But Father Emery does not answer directly. “But you’re not married,” he says, as if today she has not been reminded of that countless times, by Rose, by the newspaper, by her pounding, angry heart. He says, “Nothing has been done that cannot be undone,” and she shakes her head. 

“Whatever you are thinking, God will understand,” Father Emery says. She has not confessed, so she is not absolved, and she leaves the confessional and sits in the last pew of the church, staring up at the crucifix. 

God will understand. She turns it over in her head. Will He? Does He? Does God understand what Father Emery does not, that she cannot undo her promises to Lucien, no matter that she has not been to his bed? She understands the sacrament, knows her catechism: a marriage that has not been consummated can be dissolved–it is the second act, after ratification, that binds a husband and wife.

And yet that is not where commitment is made, not in the hayloft of her father’s barn or in Lucien’s little bedroom. No. 

There was blood on Christopher’s hands when they loaded her into the ambulance at less than six months gone, and even if they never spoke of it he had done the wash himself, all the bedding bleached and scrubbed and hung to dry. There was blood on Jack’s hands after another fall in the yard, and his father cradled him close as she cleaned them while he screamed; she met Christopher’s eyes over their kicking boy, another moment in a shared life that bound them together, piece by piece.

Does God understand that? Take me to Cairo, she asked Christopher when their first son was new, and we can see the pyramids and the Sphinx. He had fetched the baby when he squalled, put him at her breast, and they laughed together at the outlandish idea. 

Their marriage was made in their bed, yes, but also the day he didn’t laugh when she asked to go somewhere, anywhere else; there’s work to do, Jean, don’t you see? She did, and that was the end of the dream.

She is bound no less to Lucien. Seven hours on the bus to Adelaide, tucked into his shoulder as if his embrace might keep the world away; I will follow you anywhere, Jean, he said. Anywhere? To the moon, he replied, and she didn’t know if she should laugh or cry and so she’d simply sat, breathing him in. He’d thought she was asleep and he whispered, I will always follow you wherever you go. I don’t know how to live without you.

Their marriage will be made in their bed, and some days she can hardly breathe for waiting. But it was made in a picnic basket for Mei Lin, in photos she couldn’t share because they might break something important to him no matter the pain it would cause her; it was made in a compromise Jean never thought she could make, yet impossibly familiar: to put her own dreams aside for his because without him, her dreams were useless. Their marriage was made in his hospital bed, when he came awake, pale but grinning, and lied to her to make her smile. 

That cannot be undone, just as today cannot be undone, and too long she has known that the bad days bind people together almost more than the good ones. Father Emery does not understand, but does God? 

And if she draws this distinction between them, between God and His representative, what then? She draws God away from the church, this church that has been her family and her home and her only path to salvation. She told Eve Neville that God would see into her heart and forgive her–if Eve has no need of confession, if God truly understands what led her to such a grave sin as attempting suicide–.

The thought is uneasy, and one Jean has confronted before in these long, disquieting days as her choices have grown more stark. If God can forgive Eve without confession, if Jean believes Eve may find salvation without the church’s intercession, then it must follow that Jean can live a life devoted to God, a life in His service without the church.

She casts her eyes toward the altar. Can she turn away from the church and not from God? 

It isn’t what she wants. The rituals of the church are as comfortable as breathing, the worn velvet of the kneeler under her stockings, the glass of the rosary between her fingers. She does not know how to structure her life without Mass and confession, and Lucien cannot fill the space in her life, in her heart that the church will leave. 

She is reminded, too often, how much he is a man, fallible and frustrating. The husband is the head of the house as God is the head of the church, but it is the women who do the work between them, the flowers, the mending, the picking up after, the tending of hurts. They find themselves together, pouring coffee, making cakes, clearing plates, holding each other up when their men stray or drink or die. They find themselves together, setting out flowers for Christmas Mass because someone must do it, and they always have. 

Theirs is a community of friendship and obligation, and if she casts off the latter, she will surely lose the former. But yesterday, she was no longer at home with those women here, not the way she once was. Already the question of Lucien separates her from her friends–every one of them was married here, but Jean won’t be. Not this time.

But the church could not fill the space left in her heart if she left Lucien. It tried, did so much for her after Christopher, and yet that empty piece of her is fuller now with Lucien than it has ever been, bursting now with possibility for their lives together. That flash of humor in his eyes when she solves some riddle he’s been struggling with–Jean, you’re a marvel–warms and delights her, a comfort she cannot find in these four walls.

She must choose what to give up. 

If God understands, does He understand what is being asked of her? Perhaps it is supposed to be an obvious choice: think not of your community, Jean, but your salvation. But hasn’t she struggled enough to be allowed to consider the life she wants to live here, now?

She remembers that telegram, pulled from her hands by eager boys, old enough then to understand well what it said: their father six months dead, their mother’s reassurances lies all. She kept them home from school a day before sending them back, because there was no use in doing anything else, and there was work to do. 

But no matter her efforts, the pennies dwindled, and soon Jack was fighting in the schoolyard, throwing rocks at shop windows, tagging along with boys older than his brother. All the while, her mother tutted: be careful you don’t lose too much weight, Jean, and only then did she notice the way her dress hung from her frame.

She made a point then to finish her dinner as an example to her sons, who could not grow and learn if they pushed their food around their plates, mashing peas into the chipped ceramic. She quietened her tears in their little house, burying her face in the pillow so the boys would never hear her cry, and everyone said she was holding up well, a model for looking forward. 

How can you just keep going like nothing happened? Jack howled. 

How can I do anything else? Jean replied and hadn’t let him see how much she wished he was still small enough to hold to her breast, taking comfort in the warmth of a little body that could be soothed with a touch and a kiss. 

It was Father Morton who heard her rail against God, against this life He had left her. _Forgive me father, for I have sinned._ I have questioned, I have coveted, I have envied, I have failed my children, I have been angry, I have hated. 

She sent one son to prison and another to the Army that killed his father, then locked the door of her home behind her, two cases and an aloe plant to her name. She made a good life for herself: the church, the garden, the sewing circle, dinner at 5:30 on the dot. Steady on, and soon there was little to confess.

Now, she turns her pleas to God, casting her eyes skyward: Do not ask that of me again. Do not ask me to choose that life, not again. She lost Christopher, how can He ask her to turn Lucien away?

She could lose him, Jean knows. She has faced it too many times, even before she knew she cared for him: he might have married Joy, in a world that had been kinder to her. He might have taken Jean’s outburst after that impossible diplomatic dinner to heart and stayed in China with his daughter; she wouldn’t have faulted him.

He might still have loved Mei Lin. 

Jean used to imagine what it would be like to have Christopher turn up, years since: the Army was wrong, we were held prisoner, we were abandoned on that island, we were lost at sea. Mei Lin’s return was a cruel parody of her dreams, and perhaps Lucien’s too–it was not so long ago, Jean knows, that he imagined his wife’s return with a lover’s mien.

And yet there she was, after all those years, and Lucien could not muster that feeling. Jean still hates herself for how glad she was, how glad she still is, that he chose her. I’m finally ready to follow my heart, he said, in that desperate tone that belied his fear: she held his heart in her hands and could crush it between her palms if she pleased. But she couldn’t, not when he rose to answer the phone and her disappointment bubbled hot under her skin, not if it meant she might keep him just a little longer.

He might have died, stabbed in the gut, drowned in his own blood. I’ve had worse, he’d told her later, as she dressed his wound, and I knew what to do. There was never any real danger. But as she held his hand in hospital, there was blood under his fingernails where the nurses hadn’t gotten it out, and she’d known just how close it had been. 

Please, she’d prayed then and since, let me keep him just a little while longer. 

She knows what it would have been to lose him, can imagine that future as easily as she remembers her past: She would sleep mostly in Lucien’s bed, long after the sheets lost his scent. She would keep the house up, even though it would no longer host patients or raucous dinners, because it is what she knows now, her world circumscribed to this place. She would wear the widow’s veil at church every day for the man she loved and married and the man she loved and never could. 

She would never have to choose.

But there in his hospital bed, he’d come awake under her touch and lied to make her smile, and she does not remember ever being so scared, or so grateful. He’s alive, he’s alive, he’s alive, she’d thought, and fallen to her knees in thanks when he was finally home and sleeping. He was hers to keep and love for as long as they both shall live–another day, another year, as many years as they have. God willing.

She is taught, and must believe, that whatever has passed must be God’s will no matter how she cannot understand it– _But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only_ –but now it is not God’ s choice but her own. Lucien or the church.

She can’t do it again, break her own heart in the service of something greater. She can’t live the widow’s life up in her little room, not while Lucien lives and is hers to touch and tend and scold. She _can’t_ –. 

Perhaps it is selfish, choosing happiness in this life at the expense of the next, but she has had so few selfish moments. She wants more, and it remains her greatest sin.

God will understand. Whatever you’re thinking, God will understand. 

Father Emery has given her the final push she needs to give in: the church will not understand, but God will. 

You could have ruined everything, her mother said after Jean’s first pregnancy came to light. And for a boy? I raised you better than that. And here she will do it again, throw everything away for a chance at happiness. Her place in this community, her friends, her mortal soul: she will give it all up for Lucien. 

Jean rises and turns, a look over her shoulder at the altar. She will be back before everything is done.

The sun has started to set; it is later than she thought and she should hurry home. Does she need to make dinner? Lucien will not be home, she knows, and she suspects Matthew and Charlie will make themselves scarce as well. Sandwiches, then, for anyone who wants one, easy enough to repurpose for tomorrow’s lunch.

Sandwiches and wondering what to say to Lucien when she sees him. 

I love you, but–. Why didn’t you listen to me? Why don’t you trust me? Why did you lie? Do you understand what I’m giving up for you?

He doesn’t, though. How could he? Lucien left the church long ago, his argument with God rather than the laws His disciples set forth. Lucien found his comfort in whiskey, his sacrament in Jean’s fingers in his hair–he can see how much this hurts her, but he cannot truly understand. His solace has never been spiritual.

She wonders sometimes at the gaping chasms between them, if marriage will ever fully bridge their differences in education, in belief, in class. Marrying the housekeeper is a laugh in some circles, but what of the housekeeper? That good Catholic woman, always dutiful, never thought she was a social climber, that one, but there she goes, marrying above her station.

Does Lucien ever look at her and see the hired help out of the corner of his eye, the invisible woman there to press his shirts and cook his dinner and pack him off to bed when he’s had too much? She plays the role of housewife now, not so different than housekeeper in these liminal days: cooking and cleaning and looking after, still sleeping upstairs, except she no longer takes a salary. 

He set up accounts for her in town with a sheepish smile. You deserve everything, Jean, he’d said, so earnest she’d given in without a fight. Still she sees in those beautiful shops the distance between them; it’s a long, slow climb from being Mrs. Beazley, farmer’s wife, to being Mrs. Blake, doctor’s wife.

How many marriages have there been in Ballarat like theirs? Oh, surely a few, but she has to think back–none of the girls she grew up with, none of the women at church. All of them stayed neatly in their lines, farmers marrying farmer’s daughters, doctors marrying typists and artists, the Tynemans marrying money from out of town. Ballarat shows its hand again and again: there is a way things are done.

Lucien refuses convention and she loves him for it. Still the thought lingers, settling coldly in her stomach: what do you see when you look at me? 

Why didn’t you listen to me?

Jean arrives home and makes the sandwiches, ham and mustard, then ham and pickle, and leaves them in a tray on the kitchen table. She sits before it and waits and thinks, as if she will move past _why didn’t you listen to me?_ before she can ask Lucien the question. 

Do minutes pass, or hours? There’s the door–that’s Charlie, tentative steps a giveaway. He takes ham and pickle on a plate to his room, kissing her cheek on his way, but avoiding her eyes. He’s a good boy, that one, even if he makes poor choices in the girls he dates.

There’s the door–that’s Matthew, the shuffle of his bad leg cautious on the floorboards. She could call out, dinner if you want it, but she doesn’t and he does not stop in the kitchen on his way to the back room. 

She picks at a sandwich, two bites, but she isn’t hungry. She will give up everything for Lucien, this foolish man she loves despite everything, and God will understand, somehow. Does Lucien?

There’s the door–.

She’s on her feet in an instant and that’s Lucien, tie askew and hair ruffled and expression like the world is about to collapse on him. 

He says, “You know.”

As if she might not? It was in the bloody newspaper. She says, “I think everyone in town knows by now.” But more importantly: why didn’t you listen to me? Why did you send that affidavit when I specifically asked you not to? “Lucien, I thought that we agreed to wait until Mei Lin responded.”

He sags further and says, “We did, we did.”

The words tumble out, all the day’s hurt and anger at once. Why don’t you trust me? “Then why did you ignore me? Because you know best, and I’m still just the housekeeper, is that it?”

He says, “No, no. Of course not.” His eyes dull and she has hurt him with the charge, but he has hurt her with everything that has led to this moment, dissembling, ignoring her, every moment he kept up the lie.

How can he not know that the only things she needs from him is his love and his comfort and his trust, because the rest of this life she has learned to handle on her own? He was trying to protect her to the bitter last, but she knows this town better than he does, knows how to navigate its ebbs and edges; Jean will be fine. She is not so sure, right now, about Lucien.

She says, “Lucien, you don’t need to protect me, I’ve managed perfectly well on my own for a long time before you came along.”

She so rarely sees him without a fight, but now he deflates further, eyes tinged with fear and sadness. What is he afraid of, now? Her anger? He has survived it before. He says, “I know. Jean, please forgive me. I am so sorry. I’ve been a bloody fool. And I understand given everything I’ve put you through if you’ve changed your mind. About us, about everything.”

That stops her short. Changed her mind? 

Early in their acquaintance he’d commented that he hadn’t been married long, surely wasn’t very good at it. She’d thought at the time he’d meant sharing space or showing up on time for dinner, but she wonders now what the worst fight of his short marriage had been, if he had been sure Mei Lin would leave him at the slightest provocation. 

Why don’t you trust me? He is scared, somehow, that this will be the moment she decides he isn’t worth her time or her trouble or her love, that this disagreement, any disagreement, will break this precious thing between them. He is scared she will find this life she is leaving behind more valuable than the one she wants to share with him. 

And so he moves ahead with a child’s logic: pretend nothing is wrong and maybe it won’t be.

Oh Lucien. She lets her shoulders sag with his, and she is suddenly so tired. She will tell him about this day, about holding that newspaper in her hand, furious and disappointed and still so sure of her path, but to reassure him now would be to disregard all the hurt he has caused. 

She approaches him, quietly, and slides her hand into his and presses her cheek against his. He reeks of booze, but still she lingers a moment against him, a silent promise for better days. He grabs her fingers and she squeezes back, that old habit: touch for all the words they cannot muster. 

“Good night,” she says, and pulls away, letting her hand linger in his until she has reached the stairs. She doesn’t look back as she climbs them, but hears his thoughts louder than anything he might say. _I’m sorry, don’t leave, please don’t leave._

She strips off her clothes, limp with the exertions of the day. 

She’d almost left him the day he’d insulted her husband’s memory, the memories of so many husbands and brothers and sons, demeaned the experiences of every mother and widow–and looked at her, haunted, when she told him off. He’d worn that expression just now, that look of sickened realization that everything he’d believed and done had been wrong. 

A better woman would have left then, found herself employment in a more stable home. 

She almost left him after the disastrous day with the hospital board, marching away from the house as if she had a destination beyond anywhere but here. She’d slept at her sister-in-law’s and returned to find Lucien gone, an unexpected emptiness in his place. She’d imagined relief to be rid of him, of his messes and insults, and yet found herself reaching for the only gift he’d ever given her, as if wearing that brooch might keep him close to her heart.

She’d stayed for Mattie, Jean told herself–the girl could hardly live alone in her landlord’s house, and it’s not like she could cook or clean. But she’d known it was an easy lie. She stayed for some small hope of redeeming Lucien Blake, and for the garden she’d tended when nothing else in her life would grow.

She sits before her vanity in her nightclothes and reaches for her hairbrush. How often has she stared at her own face in this mirror? Morning and night for almost twelve years now.

She’d tried, once, to make another place her home. Adelaide offered so much: her boy, her granddaughter, the chance of a life away from Lucien’s oppressive, intractable gaze. She couldn’t stay here, not with his eyes on her, not with the way his fingers grazed her elbow, careful and then much less so. 

You’ll always have a job here, Jean, he’d said, that unconscious reminder that she was still his housekeeper. She couldn’t do that, not anymore. She could keep her son’s house, but not this one, not without the promise of Lucien’s hands on her shoulder or his lips on her cheek or–.

He’d followed her. He’d told her, walking in Adelaide, that Doug Ashby had died with two words on his lips: I loved. Lucien had struggled to say anything after that: I don’t want to regret–what I mean to say is–Jean, please come home. With me. 

She should have refused him, but she kissed him instead.

There were so many things a wiser woman would have done. She should have left him that first day she’d carried him drunk to bed, but the memory of his drawings burned the inside of her eyes and she looked at him not with fury but compassion. She should have left him when he’d nearly set them all on fire by shorting out the television, then when he’d used her dinner roast for target practice, but she’d laughed behind her hand the moment he turned away. 

She should have left him the day Mei Lin appeared at their doorstep. It would have been the right thing, to leave a man and his wife to reacquaint themselves after so many years apart. Leave them to rebuild their lives, remake their marriage in a new light.

And yet she’d stayed, crying for the death of a foolish dream. She’d stayed as if to remind him that no matter his broken promises, she could not be defeated by something so trivial as lost hope. He’ll have to tell me to go, Jean dared the world silently, as if she did not tempt God and fate and all of Ballarat by staying. 

And she’d known in a moment that Lucien could no more ask her to leave than cut off his own hand. 

It had been Mei Lin who had gone instead, understanding immediately what Lucien could not say: that time and circumstance and the godforsaken war had left him a different man, and he’d fallen in love with someone else. And now Mei Lin will not file for divorce so as not to shame that woman her husband loves–.

Leave that to Lucien, to mail the affidavit without understanding the consequences, because he has misapprehended all the moments Jean ignored good sense and stayed by his side. Leave him to learn, somehow, that she has bound not only her reputation but her fate to his, with his engagement ring but also with every choice, every compromise, every fight up until this point. 

Their marriage will be made out of the ashes of this day. 

I understand, he said, if you’ve changed your mind. About us, about everything.

No, she will tell him. You don’t understand at all.

**

Lucien is fractious at breakfast. Jean can look at him and tell he is tired, but then so is she. He hadn’t woken her with a nightmare, but as she’d lain awake she imagined him in the room below hers, berating himself before stalking off to his office for another drink. She thinks he deserves it, a bad night’s sleep, just as he deserves it when she tells him off for taking a fond aside about an old acquaintance–the smartest man she’d ever known, at the time–and making it a weapon of his insecurity.

She is relieved when he runs off to follow his latest half-baked epiphany, and she turns to scrub the pots and pans. An easy, familiar task.

She wonders sometimes what Christopher would make of this life she has stumbled into, if he could see past the trappings of class and education to the joy in this home. She doesn’t know–he would have understood the life she’d had with Thomas Blake, each day following a set cadence of work and obligation. But this, discussing murder over breakfast, their lives splashed across the front page of the afternoon edition all the while? He couldn’t fathom it.

Jean laughs to herself, quiet and sad in the empty house. Christopher has been dead now longer than they were married and still she clings to those old patterns, wondering what he would think about her choices. His voice echoes in head at every penny saved: always practical, that’s my girl.

Marrying Lucien and all his chaos surely isn’t practical, but still she turns it over in her head. What would Christopher think? He wouldn’t much like Lucien, and he’d say probably Jean was getting above herself. He might wonder what took her so long.

She watched most of the other members of her sad society of war widows remarry or move on to jobs in Melbourne where they might have a better chance of meeting eligible men. But not Jean, not yet. Christopher’s memory and the residue of that final, stupid argument clung to every interaction she had, and it was easier to demur.

She’d fallen in love with Christopher watching him ride a barely-broken mare in the pasture of his father’s farm, a sly grin–watch this!–off at a gallop with a whoop. After they were married, he would come home late with a fistful of cash he’d won off his mates playing two-up in someone’s barn, smelling of beer and boasting he’d buy her that refrigerator she wanted. 

Don’t be daft, she said, you’re going to lose it all next Saturday. Oh, Jeannie, have a little faith–. And he’d taken her by the waist and kissed her until she giggled and said, I do, I do, even though she knew he would never make good.

That last fight had been cruel, and unlike both of them. A joke about a recruiting poster she’d seen in town– _Work and play all over the globe_ , it said. Is that why you don’t join up? Too much travel?–had turned dangerous in an instant, twelve years of resentments ricocheting around their little kitchen. 

He’d been so angry: You have never been happy here, with me. I’m not enough for you, is that it? Because I like this life? Because I want to be here with you and those boys?

She brought her first down on the table. That’s not what I said and you know it.

The door slammed, Christopher’s words echoing behind him: You always wanted to see the world. I guess I’ll see it for you. 

And after that if grief and solitude became habit and home, his ghost her conscience and company, what did it matter? 

She keeps her memories in an album on the vanity beside her jewelry box. She pulled it out a week ago and paged through the old pictures, smoothing the corners of the photos where they had come unglued. There it was: the last picture they had of the family. It had been taken the previous Christmas, and Jack’s were legs too long for his trousers. Christopher Jr. stared resolutely into the camera, shrugging away from his father’s hand on his shoulder.

She’d forgotten about it, the hottest and earliest summer anyone could remember. The boys had chafed at wearing clothes at all, the men and the crops faded fast in the heat. 

She’d opened the album to show Lucien. He had stared at the picture, and Jean could see so many questions on his lips– _So that’s Christopher? Were you happy then?_ –but he didn’t ask. We should repaste these so they stay, he said. 

She stared at that final picture of her husband, fading now with age. He wouldn’t know her now, almost fifty, a grandmother, someone else’s fiancé. What took you so long? For a long time, she simply kept going, moving forward but never moving on, holding too tightly to the past. 

And then in a flurry of grief and rage, there was Lucien. His fingers quivered when he looked at photographs of his family, and she tried to shake the impulse to find fellowship in loss; Lucien wanted no part of it. But it was there at the corner of her mind, that abiding knowledge that he understood. He had not let go, not after all these years of fruitless searching. 

She’d learned he could make her laugh with all his questions, curiosity that belied his sadness. Jean, does this flower have medicinal properties? Do you mind if I set a small fire in the kitchen? Do you have a favorite musician? Have you read _A Doll’s House_? Well, you should, I think you would like it. Do you know where I put the axe?

She hadn’t noticed herself falling in love until it was far too late. She might have recognized it if it had felt like the carefree joy of eighteen, that overwhelming attraction that commanded her every waking moment. But no, this came in little moments over the course of a year: his presence there in the front row of her play, cheering madly for her curtain call; his heartbreak at regaining a daughter only to lose her again; the weight of his hand in hers when no one else could see. 

Mattie said they fought like an old married couple and Jean barked a laugh: well, someone has to put him in his place. What Mattie didn’t always see is that he let her.

And then the that terrible day with Jack, not the first and so surely not the last. But this one brought unexpected comfort: Lucien’s rumbling voice, This is your home, Jean, and then his arm at his waist, and his hands on her face, brushing away her tears. His heartbeat was fast under her hands, giving away the desire they had so carefully ignored.

This is your home, he said, and meant the house and the little room at the top of the stairs. But she tucked her face against his neck and cried and thought she could find a home there in his arms, the safety of comfort so long denied. He was warm and sturdy and looked at her like he would solve every problem in the world if only it would quiet her tears.

Oh.

And now the house echoes with broken plates and too-hot Bunsen burners and weapons tests in the garden, and Jean barely notices anymore. She’d screamed at Christopher Jr. once for crossing the street to look at the fireys managing a downed electrical wire, terrified he might stray too close; now, she’d step up and note whether the sparks were white or blue, better to know the temperature for the story over dinner.

A portrait of a naked woman hangs in the restaurant, a showpiece instead of something to be hidden from view. She raises her eyebrows, but can no longer find offense–Lucien is right, she is beautiful. 

You know, they’re all over Paris, Lucien said later. Naked women or just pictures of them? Jean asked. He’d bit his lip to keep from laughing. It is the city of love, my dear, he said and kissed her cheek, lingering. 

Oh Lucien. What would Christopher think of him? An officer, a spy, a surgeon, a musician, a drunk, soon a divorcee. Yesterday he’d punched a man for daring to print her name in the paper beside his, feeding that Ballarat scandal that encompasses their lives. Well, Christopher would appreciate clocking Edward Tyneman. But all the rest–.

If he could see her life, Christopher would ask, is this what you want, Jeannie? 

Yes, she might say, pursing her lips to keep from crying. It is.

You’re nothing like I remember.

It’s been seventeen years, she would say. A lot can happen. So much has happened. I wouldn’t know where to start to explain.

Jean watched Mei Lin try to learn who Lucien had become so many years after she’d loved him. After the whole Alderton affair was done, Lucien had insisted she move back into the house, and Jean understood; it was temporary, until she got her papers, and the knowledge that she would soon return to Hong Kong made Jean bite her lip in quiet appreciation. Here was the chance for Lucien and Mei Lin that Jean would never get with Christopher: to say their piece, to meet each other anew, to bid farewell.

He’s different now, Mei Lin said once during those hazy weeks.

Jean shrugged. We all are, I think, she said. 

Mei Lin had shaken her head. My father held the most wonderful parties, she said. I met Lucien at one of them, right before they demolished the Grand Hotel on the Padang. He was the life of the party, gregarious, a girl on each arm. He couldn’t fathom wanting a stable life.

Jean smiled at that. No, that was for his father, she said.

Mei Lin had raised her eyebrows in acknowledgement, but Jean could see the way sadness creased the corner of her eyes. Jean was the one who knew these details now, who had watched Lucien settle back into a place he’d sworn he hated, more content than she could have imagined when she met him.

Yes, Mei Lin said. And here he is. I see it right before me, but I can hardly believe that is Lucien.

Are you the same woman you were? Jean asked, pouring the tea and sitting across the table from her guest. 

No one could be the same person after everything we’ve seen, after all this time, Mei Lin said. But it is a nice fantasy on long nights.

Yes, Jean said. It is. 

Her vision of Christopher is suspended in time: thirty-four the last time she saw him, strong from work in the fields, dark hair falling loosely over his forehead. Would it have grayed by now? Would his knees have gone bad as he turned fifty, fifty-one? She doesn’t know; in her dreams, he is always young.

They sat quietly for long minutes. Jean tried to imagine the Lucien Mei Lin had known, a dashing figure in a crisp uniform, who still believed the world was his for the taking. His arrogance would have drawn every woman in the room to his side; she wonders what he saw in Mei Lin then, what fellow adventuresome spirit time and circumstance and the godforsaken war had taken from her.

If Jean’s dreams had died the moment Mei Lin appeared on their doorstep, what of Mei Lin’s? No matter Alderton’s betrayal, she must have she imagined a future with Lucien when she learned he was alive. Had she wanted to hold her husband in her arms again, pretending for a moment all those years hadn’t passed? 

And yet, what had she found? Her handsome officer a country doctor, happy here in sleepy, gossipy Ballarat. The man she once loved, following another woman with his eyes and his hands, fists balled against the practiced impulse to touch her. 

If Lucien is going to make his home here, Mei Lin said, looking around Jean’s kitchen, I’m glad he has you.

Jean stared, but it was no use arguing the obvious; every night, Mei Lin excused herself early, pleading a wish to read or write letters to her daughter, but Jean knew it was to escape the heaviness in the air as Lucien turned to make a remark to Jean and stopped himself as he remembered Mei Lin was there. 

Mei Lin rose from the table, tea in hand. She smiled, sad but resolute and excused herself to finish her tea in her room.

Now, as then, Jean tries to imagine what that conversation had meant to Mei Lin. She doesn’t think she could she do the same, give her blessing for her husband to marry another woman, even in these peculiar circumstances.

But it hardly matters. Christopher is dead, never to have his head turned by a pretty girl again. Jean will never have to reckon with the man she loved growing into someone she doesn’t understand, who doesn’t love her. No, if it was Christopher in Mei Lin’s shoes, it would be Jean he would find changed by time and life and the damn fool man she’s going to marry.

So much has happened.

Jean shakes her head to clear her thoughts. So much to do today even if she would like to wool-gather: clean the kitchen, make notes for the butcher for the Christmas roast, finish her knitting, fetch the post.

Fetch the post–.

There is a note from Mei Lin and Jean runs her fingers around the envelope’s borders. _Speak of the devil and he doth appear_ –but Jean suspects this will be a welcome missive. She opens the letter carefully. The paper is fragile between her fingers, but the message is straightforward: I want this to be as quiet and as discreet as possible. Please let me know how to ensure this is not difficult for you.

For a second day in a row, Jean wants to crumple the paper between her hands. It is still too new, and her frustration flares up again. We agreed to wait, we agreed to see what she would say. Why didn’t you trust me?

Knowing the answer does not make the words before her less vexing. Does Lucien realize how much they owe Mei Lin? Mei Lin could have made things difficult, accused Lucien of adultery and named Jean outright–Jean wouldn’t have blamed her. But no, here she is arguing for discretion. 

Oh Lucien. How is he the only one of them who doesn’t understand how this should have gone?

She imagines the argument again: what would you have me do instead? I just want to marry you, Jean.

Don’t lie to me, she thinks again.

But love made him unwise, as it does them all. And so Lucien wrote a letter to the court proclaiming his failures as a husband and a man, all to dissolve a marriage he once cherished to a woman he loved deeply. If Lucien can do that, if Mei Lin can look at her husband and give him to another woman, can argue that her divorce should be quiet and expedient all to protect that woman’s reputation–.

It is a gift Jean will never be able to repay, except, she thinks, to learn from the example: Mei Lin looked Lucien in the eye and said goodbye. It is time for both of us to start our lives again.

It is time. Time to let the church go, to let Christopher go, to bind her life to Lucien’s. 

Jean runs her hand over her mouth, curling her fingers into a fist against her lips. Is that it, then? The work of a lifetime, here in a moment. 

Tears well at the corner of her eyes and she lets them fall. 

**

In the morning, Lucien goes to his office. Jean knows he doesn’t have anything to work on–the case is closed and he has no patients to see today, but he must pretend to usefulness or drive himself and all of them out of their minds.

Jean steps in, pulling the door behind her. Lucien looks up from his journal expectantly, the skin around his eyes tight from stress. He had bid her goodnight the previous evening: I love you, you know that, right? And she could see the hurt in his face, the concern that she might not comprehend why he had acted so rashly.

Yes, I do, she had said last night before closing the door on the conversation. He loves her, of course he does. Nothing else could ever be so blinding.

Then again, Jean is no better. She wants too much, and so she is here still, staring into Lucien’s beloved face, wondering if she can ever explain how well she understands and how much he still needs to learn. 

“Jean,” Lucien says now, wary.

“Lucien,” she says, crossing her arms though the room is warm with the summer heat rising outside. She doesn’t like the uneasiness in his voice, that low echo of his misplaced fear. He needs reconciliation more than chastisement, and she isn’t here to scold him. Instead she asks, “When is the divorce hearing set? The paper just said next month.”

Lucien smiles tightly. “January seventeenth,” he says.

“And you expect it will go through.”

He nods, eyes never leaving her face. “Yes,” he says. “No one will contest it.”

Jean closes her eyes and takes a breath before focusing on him again. “Good.” His marriage will end with the mark of a judge’s pen on paper, a simple death for something that once held so much meaning. A quiet start to the rest of their lives.

Lucien stands and walks around the desk to face her. He cups her cheek with his hand, a small familiar caress. “I am sorry,” he says. 

She leans into his touch, his fingers warm on the skin of her face. No one has ever touched her like Lucien can, at this new intersection of gentleness and desire. With Christopher it was always one or the other, and there was no one before him or since. She says, “I already told you–.”

Lucien interrupts. “I know. Don’t be sorry. Do better.” He smiles softly and brings his free hand to her back, drawing her closer. It is easy then to lean into his embrace, cheek against his shoulder, fists balled against his chest. She listens to his breath and his heartbeat, feels the scratch of his beard against her temple. 

“You have to, Lucien,” she says, staring at the fabric of his waistcoat. “Whatever happens, we need to be in this together.” It is the most important thing. It is the only important thing.

He nods, chin sharp against her forehead, and then pushes her back from him with light pressure on her jaw. He looks down into her eyes, full of promise and apology. “I know,” he says. “I will.”

Perhaps it is naive to believe him, given their brief history. And yet, she carries with her the remembrance of a letter now tucked away beside other precious things: I have found my home. The rest was unwritten and too new, then: I have found my home, here, with you. It was the moment she believed he might change or at least improve himself upon his return, and despite the many careless days since, he has. She sees it every day, feels it in the weight of his gaze.

Jean takes a breath and looks away from his eyes, focusing on his tie, the knot immaculate. What a peculiar thing that someone so disordered should be so tidy in dress. She is sure his father insisted, and later his wife. It is one of the little things that fascinated her about him, early in their acquaintance, and now it is but a piece of him that compels her attention and her affection. 

“I’m leaving the church,” she says.

He doesn’t respond except for the touch of his thumb on her face moving back and forth, soft and sure. For a minute there is nothing in the world but both of them, breathing in her statement. Is that how it will be from now on? She lost her husband long ago, she will step out of the shadow of her church. Her boys have their own lives, too far from here. There is nothing now but her and Lucien.

She leans forward and rests her head against his shoulder, shifting her arms to wrap them around his waist. She can feel his relief as he returns the embrace, one hand firm at her back, the other sliding to the back of her neck, holding her close under her hair. He curls his fingers there, tanging them in the short strands, warm and desperate.

“I’m sorry,” he says again, the words a breath against her temple. 

Jean shakes her head against his shoulder. “Don’t be sorry,” she says. She slides her fingers under his waistcoat, resting her hand against the starched cotton of his shirt, closer to him than she was before. “It’s what I want.”

She feels him nod, but his shoulders slump under her touch. It shouldn’t have to be like this, he’d said last night. He’d meant the divorce and its impossible particulars, but too easily could have included the church and its strictures, or the way Ballarat closes in around them, demanding to know every detail of their lives. A week from now, someone will notice: Jean Beazley didn’t attend Christmas Mass for the first time in forty-nine years, and that will be as good as they engagement announcement they can’t yet print.

Lucien kisses the top of her head then rests his cheek against it. She has a lifetime of this embrace before her, in Paris and in Rome and in this house that that has become theirs, together. The whole world, here in his arms.

“I love you,” she says. “You know that, right?”

She feels him smile softly against her hairline, and he curls his hands more tightly against her. “Yes,” he says. “I do.”

***


End file.
